Lorna,

Your question has kept me thinking all night and I went over my career in particular.

Like I stated before, open source is an attitude where you think in concepts of “how can I share my knowledge to help others and receive feedback so I can learn too”.

This attitude has given my career an enormous boost. When starting a new contract I stipulate that I contribute generic components that would benefit the open source tools I use on the job, I motivate the development team to participate in user group meetings, attend events like PHPTestFest or Bughuntdays, I give weekly training courses on open source tools and set up workshops to show best practices, and I persuade management and sales to join discussions regarding strategies and tools to improve workflow and internal communication.

I’ve been working with mostly enterprises and governmental institutes since 2001. It has taken a while, but since the credit crunch of lately, I receive little to no refusal on these terms. Better, they embrace this attitude and are happy someone like me stepped up to the cause.